In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous and quotable 21-year-old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, while Taft concluded agreements in Roosevelt's name. The author of Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys here explains how the secret agreements that TR thought would secure America's westward push into the Pacific instead "lit a long fuse on firecrackers that would singe our hands for a hundred years."

"James Bradley's incendiary new book ... is startling enough to reshape conventional wisdom about Roosevelt's presidency.... In Flags of Our Fathers he wrote about how his father helped plant the American flag on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II. In The Imperial Cruise he asks why American servicemen like his father had to be fighting in the Pacific at all."—NYTimes

"A provocative study.... What is fascinating about Bradley's reconstruction of a largely neglected aspect of Roosevelt's legacy is the impact that his racial theories and his obsession with personal and national virility had on his diplomacy. Engrossing and revelatory ... revisionist history at its best."—NYTBR